


The Flames Rolled On

by ailcia



Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: Episode Related
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-17
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-18 06:39:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9372599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ailcia/pseuds/ailcia
Summary: Coda to 4.2: Canticle - Fred doesn't know what to do.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, even though there have already been a couple of excellent codas to this episode, I literally just couldn't help myself. There are a couple of similarities with athena_crikey's fic - completely coincidental, but I'm also secretly delighted because I love her work so much.
> 
> First time writing Endeavour fic and posting anything on A03. Just want to take this opportunity say thanks to all the writers and in this fandom - you've brought me a lot of joy. Hopefully, this will bring you some in return! (Maybe joy is the wrong word...)

“It’s okay, Morse, it’s okay. You’re alright, Morse, alright? It’s okay, you’re okay…”

Thursday kept up this litany, this murmured prayer, but it did nothing to drown out the wailing, and it did bugger else besides. Morse couldn’t hear him, couldn’t even see him. Lord knew what he was seeing, but it frightened the life out of him, and Thursday to boot. His panicked heart was hammering, ten to.

He’d managed to get one careful hand on Morse’s juddering back, even though he twisted and wracked and slammed himself against the wall. The sweat was pouring off him, as if the fire in his belly was burning him up from the inside out. Scorching his mind. 

Thursday tried to get a better grip on him, tried to pull him away from the wall, but Morse started screaming. A blood-curdling shriek that went right through Thursday, and he let go out of pure shock, appalled.

“Alright, alright, it’s alright,” he tried to placate him, holding up his hands, useless.

A noise behind him. He turned, and Strange was approaching, staring hard at Morse with huge eyes. 

Thursday didn’t blame him. It was wrong. It was all so wrong. The screaming was subsiding and that awful, desperate keening starting up, punctuated by harsh gasps and jerking limbs.

“She’s cuffed to the car. Sir, what- “

“Get an ambulance, fast,” Thursday barked. “Tell them he’s been poisoned with something, possibly LSD, but we don’t know.”

“Morse? Matey, are you alright?” Strange edged closer, anxiously. “What’s she done to him?”

“Strange, get the ambulance. Tell them he needs immediate sedation. Wait for them outside. Keep an eye on her… Get her to tell you what she’s given him, if you can.”

Strange didn’t move. He was shaking his head in slow horror. “He’s completely lost the run of himself.”

“He’ll be alright, now MOVE. That’s an order.”

Morse flinched and cried out at the shout. Strange snapped back to attention, eyes flicking back to meet Thursday’s – fear and determination reflected. Strange fled.

Thursday turned back to the writhing mass where his constable used to be, at a loss. Would he? Morse was groaning deeply and mashing his face into the floorboards, shaking his head back and forth, his fingernails scraping down the wood as he tried to claw his way out of his hallucinations. Teeth bared and breath coming harder and harder.

“Morse? Morse, can you hear me?” He moved as close as he dared, afraid. When they’d found him, the young singer had been spaced out, staring his unearthly stare: he’d been coaxed away from the fire and into the boat in a daze and he’d only started screaming when they’d reached the banks and he’d seen the horrified faces of his friends flaring in the harsh torchlight. But he’d been calm to begin with. Why couldn’t Morse just be bloody calm? 

He knew the answer before the question had even formed in his mind. Morse did not have a calm mind. As if on cue, Morse began wailing again, crying out in frustration, deeply distressed and desperate to get away from what was around him, but thwarted by the laws of the physical universe. He began banging his forehead against the floor.

“Morse? Morse, please…” He crept closer, trying to peer into the shelter Morse had made for himself, arms curled and clenching around his head. “Endeavour.”

Morse responded to the noise rather than the name, dropping his arms and turning his head, startled. For the first time, Thursday got a good look at his face. The breath went out of him. Flushed face framed by sweaty locks, bright eyes wild and unfocused, staring out with blown pupils shuttering from side to side, as if watching a whirling room. His jaw pulled tight, panting. Barely human. 

“Endeavour,” Thursday said again, and his voice caught. He didn’t know this drug, but the look in Morse’s eye, pure fear… For someone who lived so much in his head, who so prided himself on his mental powers and his certainty in the world around him, and was always so shaken when the world was not as he took it to be. The loss of control alone must be terrifying. If he knew it was happening. 

“Endeavour… Please,” he said again, because he didn’t know what else to do. He was overcome with the urge to pull the younger man to him, tuck him under his chin and hold him till the nightmare was over. But he couldn’t. He didn’t dare.

He watched a tear slip from one eye, followed by a few more. Morse whimpered, and his hands shook where they held his ears. “Don’t go,” he whispered, harsh and desperate.

It was the first semblance of speech he'd got. “I’m not going anywhere,” Thursday assured him, voice gentle, before realising that Morse wasn’t talking to him, was looking right through him. 

More tears chased tracks down the quivering cheeks, growing ever redder. “Don’t! No, god, please… Stay!” 

Thursday reached out, then, couldn’t help himself. Tentatively, he began stroking the drenched curls at the base of Morse’s skull, laying a hand on back of the lad’s neck and using his thumb. His chest hurt.

“Please, I swear,” Morse began to sob, a broken noise, his hands reaching out, begging the thin air. “Please, please… Don’t leave me.”

Thursday’s gut clenched. He knew next to nothing about the boy’s past, but knew much of it was so deeply painful that Morse often struggled to bear it. He didn’t want Morse going through it all now, spilling his heart out without even realising, sharing secrets he’d always sought to keep from them. Not even Thursday had a business knowing this, if Morse didn’t want him to.

“Shhhhh, now. You’re alright. It’s alright. I’m here, it’s okay.”

Morse stilled a little, seemingly soothed by the tenor of Thursday’s voice and the soft stroking. The tears were still rolling endlessly down his face, though, as if from a bottomless well of despair. He wept and wept, his whole heart upturned and bare while his eyes saw nothing but the awfulness inside. Thursday felt sick to his stomach, but kept up his whispered prayers and they stayed like this, in this sorrowful purgatory, until the ambulance arrived.

Half-peace abruptly ruptured by a gunfire of boots on steps, Morse wrenched away from Thursday with a howl, tearing at his hair and curling into a ball. When the doctor and drivers approached, Thursday pulled away, but Morse lashed out with his foot, catching one of the ambulance drivers in the knee and sending him down. It all happened so quickly, Thursday was struck dumb. But the other driver, seeing his partner fall, leapt forward and wrapped his arms around Morse, attempting to restrain him. 

Morse bucked and raged, hollering in terror, “No, NO! No, no, no, no! No, please! PLEASE!”

His head smashed back against the wall with an audible bang, and he screamed again, whether in pain, fear or anger Thursday didn’t know. Pressing their advantage with practice, the drivers together man-handled him, writhing and kicking, onto their stretcher. Then one of them sat on his chest while the other wrapped restraints around his wrists and fastened him to the stretcher.

“No, Christ! PLEASE, don’t! NO!” he cried, pulling with all his might against the restraints and causing an almighty clatter of metal. Panicked, he fell back into incoherence, all semblance of sense gone once more, destroyed in the blink of an eye. As the doctor inserted the needle into his arm, he arched his back in pain, contorting, the muscles of his neck rigid. 

As the sedative hit his system, he fell back. Boneless.

Then there was silence, except for three ragged sets of breath. 

They carried him out. On the stairs, Thursday rubbed at his face and found that it was wet.

Sunshine and fresh air. The ambulance waiting. Morse’s eyes were open but he wasn’t there. Walking alongside, Thursday saw the swaying summer trees reflected in his tears.


	2. Chapter 2

It was the eyes that did for him. Always had. Those big, mournful pools. You’d give him anything he wouldn’t ask for. It was almost a relief to Thursday when Morse lost consciousness in the ambulance on the way there. Almost.

“Oi, he’s passed out,” he reached across the prostrate constable and grabbed the doctor’s arm.

The doctor spared him a cursory glance, busy with his notebook. “Best thing for him, I’d have thought.”

Fred supposed, upon reflection, that he couldn’t really argue with that.

\---

The peace hadn’t lasted. Hadn’t lasted at all. 

Once they’d got him out of the ambulance and cuffed him to a bed, they’d given him stuff to make him sick. A big brute of an orderly stood at the head, using his whole weight to pin Morse’s shoulders down while the doctor forced a funnel in his mouth and held it there with a clamped hand, pouring liquid charcoal down his throat.  
Morse choked, eyes wide and desperate, unable to get away. The noise was horrific as he bucked and fought, gagging, great glugs of blackness streaming down the side of his face and pooling beneath the collar of his sweat-soaked shirt. His hands, helpless, clenched white.

Once all the charcoal had been poured into him, the doctor stepped aside. Morse jack-knifed, hurling forward and bringing up pints and pints of the stuff into a basin a nurse held. He heaved and heaved, hanging as far over to one side of the bed as his restraints would let him. After an age, he went limp, his whole weight pulling down on from one arm, gasping for air.

The nurse, freed from the rank basin, gently pushed him upright and back into an assembly of pillows before taking a damp sponge to his face. Morse’s eyes were whirling in their sockets and he moaned, seemingly in pain. 

“What’s the matter with him? Can’t you give him anything else?” Thursday wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take.

The doctor looked up. “I’m afraid not. Until we know more about what he’s taken.”

“He didn’t take anything. He was given it against his will,” Thursday snarled.

“My apologies,” the doctor conceded. “But until we know what is in his system, there’s not much else we can do.”

Fred nodded, watching as the nurse finished with the sponge and began to pick open Morse’s tarred shirt. Thursday saw how the breath rattled in his thin chest. 

“Suppose there’s no point in asking what we’re looking at?”

The doctor looked at him sharply, then his face shifted. “Obviously it’s too soon to tell, but any form of toxic psychosis carries with it certain risks.”

“Such as?”

The doctor cleared his throat. “Well, aside from the obvious delirium and associated features, the things we shall be most worried about in the next few hours are respiratory distress, blindness, organ failure, coma and death.”

Thursday felt the world tilt ever so slightly. “Right.” 

They both stood at the bottom of Morse’s bed, letting this information sink in. Morse’s head kept lolling down onto his chest, his bare shoulders hunching and dropping as he shivered and struggled to get it back up again.

“He’s fighting the sedatives.”

Fred swallowed. “He would.”

\----

Ten minutes or so of relative calm later, just as Thursday was committing to the final stages of pulling himself away from his bedside, Morse had a seizure. Fred saw his eyes roll up first, and was frightened by the whites of them. He shouted for help as, suddenly rigid, Morse’s whole body began to quake, muscles shaking and spine taught. Morse ground out a cry between clenched teeth, then his breath stopped in his throat. Medics ran in around him: a cold compress was held to his head and a wooden stick jammed between his teeth, but no more. The convulsions lasted barely half a minute, and Morse sank into unconsciousness once more. An oxygen mask was snapped briskly onto his face.

Thursday, shaken beyond all words or thought, left.

\----

Later, full of scotch, Fred sat and contemplated the shiny patches on his knees, marks of the time he’d spent trying to coax Morse into coherence. It felt like hours ago. He checked his watched automatically. It was. 

Morse had raved thought all through the evening and into the night. Slipping in and out of consciousness, in and out of violence, he’d been just as confused as when they’d first found him. He’d kept everyone out of the room, so there were no others could be guilty of hearing the dark and secret things that rolled out of his bagman (he would always be his bagman). Awful self-recriminations, guilt and fear. So much fear. But needs must. Thursday had spent several extremely uncomfortable minutes pretending to be Morse’s deceased father in the attempt to calm him down. Morse had worked himself up into a fit, apologising over and over and over for not being there. His memories seemed to be all tangled up, for Thursday knew for a fact that he had been with the man when he died, as any good son should. Hell, he’d driven him up himself, and he never would forget how grey Morse had been on that day, suffering against grief and a painful gunshot wound, both. 

By, but they’d seem some more since then. Sometimes it had seemed like the whole world was against them. And Morse had never once stopped fighting, or at least, not for long. Even with the wind out of his sails, he’d never faltered in his need to save people, his near-obsessive need to police the line between right and wrong. The lad had more spirit and courage in his little finger than many had in a squadron. It awed and infuriated Thursday, seeing Morse struggle against the tides that threatened to overwhelm him: his past, his fraught self, his superiors… His inspector. 

Against Morse, Thursday felt the full weight of his failure, all his faults cast in sharp relief by the brightness of this boy. He’d faltered, and Joan had punished him for it. He knew he’d done it to himself, had been warned time and again, and by Morse most of all, but that knowledge was not enough to stop the anger. One mistake, out of a lifetime of sacrifice, a lifetime of putting himself on the line. 

Thursday, rousing himself, tried to steer his mind away from such black thoughts. But where better to sit and stew than in a hospital? He hated it, hated that he couldn’t escape it, hated how everyone had left him to it: Sam, Joan, Win, and now… 

He thought of everything that had gone on recently, all the darkness and distance between him and Morse. Casting his mind back over the past couple of weeks, he’d seen countless cruel moments of snubs and sharp words. Flinches masked by pressed lips and quips. He could have reached out, time and again, but chose not to. Morse, he realised now, seeing his cheekbones sharp against the hospital linen, had lost weight these past few weeks. Or was it months. He’d noticed the drinking, of course, and the clouds gathering beneath his eyes. Never a good sign. But Thursday had just ignored him – too wrapped up in his own regrets to bother with anyone else’s. Risking it all again, history repeating.

Not for the first time since Blenheim Vale, Thursday missed Morse. Missed the twinkle he’d once had. He had no bloody right, having done his own part in stamping it out, slowly but surely, over the years. Maybe this was the price. 

It was a price he could not bear to pay.

In the wee small hours, Morse had stopped talking, rolled to one side, and slipped into a stupor, the doctor called it. They’d taken the restraints away. At first, Thursday had found the merciful silence a blessing, but as it wore on, it had begun to seriously unnerve him. The endless staring and lack of response, followed by the hours of dead sleep. It was then that he’d begun to seriously consider the possibility of life without Morse. It was then that he’d become truly afraid. 

When Morse shifted in his sleep, he couldn’t help himself. He had to know.

“Friday…. It’s Friday.” The smallest of smirks. Satisfied with himself. That old pride.

Thursday felt his eyes close. He felt almost weak with relief. An irritation turned into a code, a password, a secret signal just for them. He reached forward and clapped a hand on Morse’s foot, squeezing it, the hospital sheets scratching his palm.

But the smirk had already faded, and Morse was staring glassily out of the window. Another test of memory, but as Thursday gave him the answer, Morse had drifted slightly, gaze falling to one side. And far away. He looked all in and barely there. 

But he was there enough. Thursday left him, scrunching and rubbing his eyes like Sam used to when it was time for bed, woozy. Standing behind the curtain, catching his breath, Thursday made them both a promise.

\---  
The End  
\---


End file.
